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Below are my passer ratings through week 7. See here for the methodology (including an update as to what the numbers actually mean). Basically, the values can be loosely treated as the number of points a team would score with a given QB (passing offense) vs if they had an average QB. So, if Peyton has a 5.75, this means that his team is scoring 5.75 more points per game than if they had an average QB in his place. (The rating is unnamed as of now, but something along the lines of "Points Added QB Rating" would be clever - no?)

Before you see the rankings, I wanted to point out a few movers - both up and down, some interesting points, and, finally, a comparison to the "traditional" rating.

Movers within the rankings:

Peyton took back the number one spot after Brees, despite a 4th quarter comeback, had a relatively weak day against a poor Miami pass defense.

Philip Rivers moved up 4 spots after posting an 8.9 Y/A and 3 TDs against KC.

Aaron Rodgers moved up 3 spots after decimating the Browns. More importantly, he didn't take any sacks in the victory.

Speaking of Rodgers, I recently started a series of Deep Dives into why some players have the rankings they do. This Sunday, he didn't get sacked at all - of course, he was playing the Browns. The first was about how Rodgers' sacks are really hurting his ranking. I also did a follow-up Deep Dive into Rodgers' success on third downs.

Further down in the rankings, Carson Palmer, Mark Sanchez and Jake Delhomme moved up 4, 4 and 6 spots, respectively.

Eli dropped 3 spots after throwing 3 picks and posting a 5.5 Y/A against a middle of the road Arizona defense.

Despite a victory, Big Ben dropped 5 spots (from 5 to 10) after going for 5.3 yards per attempt against the Vikings.

Side note: At some point I plan on digging into why teams sometimes win despite poor QB play. This week, Big Ben didn't even have to show up. The Steelers held the Vikings somewhat in check and actually scored 14 of the team's 27 points.

Matt Ryan dropped 6 spots. Ryan had a Y/A of 4.5 against a Dallas team who ranks 16th in Y/A defense. Ryan, who had only been sacked twice all season coming into the game - and hadn't been sacked since week 1 - was sacked 4 times for 24 yards. His single week rating was -6.84 (see bottom table) - good for 24th out of 28 eligible quarterbacks.

Ryan's poor day was not only a function of the sacks. Ryan only gained 198 yards on 35 pass attempts for an unadjusted Y/A of 5.6 - a yard and a half below his average for the season.

I don't think 2 games constitutes a trend, but, after a sparkling day against the 49ers in week 5, Ryan has posted back to back Y/As below 6.

After climbing the rankings for a few weeks, Brett Favre dropped three spots with his clunker against the Steelers (5.4 Y/A - no TDs and one INT).

Other Interesting Points:

Not only did Tony Romo justify his lofty spot in my rankings, but, he actually moved up one spot to the number 3 spot following a big day (9.6 Y/A) against the Falcons.

Tony Romo gets a good amount of criticism - is it all unwarranted? According to ColdHardFootballFacts, Tony Romo is now in the top 5 in all-time Y/A. In fact, among the top 5, only Romo and Steve Young have played since 1960. These are some pretty impressive stats for a guy who catches a lot of grief.

Although Alex Smith does not qualify (based on attempts) for the cumulative rating, he had a great week and may be worth keeping an eye on.

My Rankings vs. "Traditional" Ratings:
In my methodology, I point out the differences between my ratings and the "traditions" passer ratings. Specifically, the differences can be summed up as:

Completion % has been removed as an independent factor

Significantly different weights assigned to the factors that were included

Quality of opponent was factored into the calculation

Sacks are measured.

(A quick note on completion percentage - since I've gotten a good amount of feedback that suggest I shouldn't ignore it altogether. The formula for Yards per Attempt (ignoring sack yardage for now) is Yards/Attempts. This can be re-written as Yards/ Completion X Completion/Attempts. Completion/Attempts is completion percentage. Since it is inherent in Y/A, it has not actually been removed from the model. The "traditional" rankings give it too much weight by counting completion percentage and Y/A)

In the ratings table below, I have highlighted in yellow five players where there is some deviation between my rankings and the traditional rankings. Below I will dig into why two of them (Tony Romo and Brett Favre) differ from the "traditional" ratings.

First, the Methodologies:

Traditional:

The formula for the "traditional" rating is:

a = ((Comp/Att) * 100) -30) / 20 [Completion percentage]

b = ((TDs/Att) * 100) / 5 [TouchdownPass pct]

c = (9.5 – (Int/Att) * 100))/4 [Interception pct]

d = ((Yards/Att) – 3) / 4 [Yards per attempt]

The final formula is (a + b + c + d)/.06

My Rating

Y/A Differential - Y/A minus the opponent’s average Y/A yielded (times a factor of 2.5 - as determined by the regression model) MINUS

Notes: The opponent’s Y/A is bounded at a maximum of 7.2 and a minimum of 5.2. This is done because a team’s average Y/A yielded could be greatly affected by a single game (I call this the “Peyton Manning” effect) — especially early in the season.

Here are the statistics needed to calculate either rating (except for the opposition adjustment in my ratings).

Player

Comp %

Y/A (Unadj
for Sacks)

TD %

INT %

Sacks

Sack Yards

Y/A Adj
For Sacks

Brett Favre

69%

7.3

5.2%

1.3%

18

127

6.3

Tony Romo

60%

8.5

4.6%

2.1%

11

56

7.8

The "traditional" rating would break down as follows (based on application of the above formula):

Value Towards
Rating

Favre

Romo

Difference
(Favre - Romo)

Comp %

32.5

25.3

7.2

TD %

17.5

15.5

2.0

Int %

34.1

31.0

3.1

Y/A

18.1

23.0

(4.9)

Rating

102.2

94.7

7.5

My rating would break down as follows (the actual calculation needs to take place on a weekly basis. Below is an aggregation of results):

Value Towards
Rating

Favre

Romo

Difference
(Favre - Romo)

Y/A Differential
(Adj For Sacks)

0.12

4.6

(4.5)

TD %

1.0

0.9

0.1

Int %

(0.7)

(1.0)

0.4

Rating

0.52

4.5

(4.0)

In the "traditional" ratings (I'm going to call them TDR from now on), you can see that Favre wins by 7.5 points - a fairly significant amount. The two are close to even in TD and INT - Favre comes out slightly ahead in each. However, Romo comes out significantly ahead in Y/A and, more importantly, Favre comes out well ahead in completion percentage.

I did the calculation and, if Romo had completed 70% of his passes (like Favre) his rating would be 102.8 - almost identical to Favre. But, they have the same number of yards and Romo has 35 fewer attempts. Favre is being rewarded for being conservative - throwing mostly checkdown passes (especially in the early games) with an average completion going for just over 10 yards.

As Peter King said in hi 10/16 article: "The best single statistical barometer of quarterback proficiency is probably yards-per-attempt because it measures how far downfield a quarterback is getting the ball on his average pass-drop."

Further, Favre's high completion percentage is already factored into his Y/A. Again, Y/A = Y/Completion X Comp %. The fact that Romo manages to have a higher Y/A with a -10% differential in completion percentage indicates that completion percentage is a meaningless statistic when taken by itself.

If you look at my ratings, Romo wins big in the Y/A. There are a couple of reasons for that.

Favre has been sacked seven more times than Romo (18 vs 11) for 71 more sack yards. This brings the Y/A (adjusted for sacks) to 7.8 for Romo and 6.3 for Favre. A differential of 1.5 yards (and remember, Favre has a better comp %). This cost Favre 2.5 points in the ratings.

The opposition factor had a negigible effect. Favre's rating dropped by 0.66 points while Romo's dropped by 0.62 points.

The two are fairly even in INT and TDs. I believe TDR suffers from, among other things, the over-reliance on completion percentage. And I believe my methodology corrects for that.

See the Aaron Rodgers Deep Dive to see how his rating was greatly affected by sacks.

The first table below has the cumulative rankings through week 7. The table below that has the ratings for week 7 only.

Passer Ratings Through Week 7

Rank

Player

Rating

Movement From Week 6

Traditional Rating

Traditional Rating - Rank

1

Peyton Manning

5.75

1

114.5

1

2

Drew Brees

5.59

(1)

106.9

3

3

Tony Romo

4.54

1

94.7

10

4

Philip Rivers

3.83

4

96.1

9

5

Matt Schaub

3.75

2

104.4

4

6

Eli Manning

3.32

(3)

92.3

13

7

Kevin Kolb

2.96

2

88.9

17

8

Tom Brady

2.73

2

99.9

8

9

Kyle Orton

2.70

2

100.1

7

10

Ben Roethlisberger

2.65

(5)

102.6

5

11

Aaron Rodgers

2.65

3

110.8

2

12

Matt Ryan

1.50

(6)

90.2

14

13

Joe Flacco

1.09

0

93.8

11

14

Kurt Warner

0.59

1

89.1

16

15

Brett Favre

0.52

(3)

102.2

6

16

Carson Palmer

0.40

4

89.2

15

17

Jay Cutler

-0.63

0

82.9

21

18

Chad Henne

-0.66

(2)

76.5

24

19

Byron Leftwich

-1.02

0

71.2

29

20

David Garrard

-1.08

(2)

83.9

20

21

Jason Campbell

-1.83

1

85.8

18

22

Seneca Wallace

-2.20

(1)

93.3

12

23

Donovan McNabb

-2.20

0

82.6

22

24

Matthew Stafford

-2.47

0

65.5

31

25

Matt Hasselbeck

-3.04

1

85.0

19

26

Marc Bulger

-3.37

(1)

72.5

28

27

Mark Sanchez

-3.57

4

61.5

34

28

Kerry Collins

-3.83

1

62.0

33

29

Jake Delhomme

-3.92

6

56.5

35

30

Chad Pennington

-4.02

(3)

76.0

25

31

Shaun Hill

-4.46

(3)

79.6

23

32

Josh Johnson

-4.63

1

50.9

36

33

Kyle Boller

-4.73

3

66.1

30

34

Trent Edwards

-4.83

0

73.0

27

35

Matt Cassel

-5.61

(3)

73.2

26

36

JaMarcus Russell

-6.42

1

47.2

37

37

Brady Quinn

-7.01

1

62.9

32

38

Derek Anderson

-8.58

1

40.6

38

Week 7 Ratings

Rank

Player

Rating

1

Aaron Rodgers

17.11

2

Carson Palmer

14.89

3

Tony Romo

11.41

4

Alex Smith

8.03

5

Philip Rivers

6.68

6

Matt Schaub

5.78

7

Mark Sanchez

5.69

8

Tom Brady

4.01

9

Peyton Manning

1.04

10

Jake Delhomme

0.38

11

Kurt Warner

0.29

12

Jason Campbell

-0.68

13

Brett Favre

-0.80

14

Donovan McNabb

-0.97

15

Ryan Fitzpatrick

-1.02

16

Ben Roethlisberger

-2.31

17

Bruce Gradkowski

-2.59

18

Chad Henne

-3.36

19

Jay Cutler

-3.96

20

Josh Johnson

-4.56

21

Drew Brees

-5.37

22

Eli Manning

-6.17

23

Marc Bulger

-6.76

24

Matt Ryan

-6.84

25

Derek Anderson

-10.15

26

JaMarcus Russell

-10.67

27

Shaun Hill

-10.95

28

Matt Cassel

-15.20

3 comments:

I really like your rating system. One thing you might consider including is QB fumbles. Part of the grief Romo has gotten is about his fumbles. In terms of field position, QB fumbles that are lost can be much worse than an INT.

Romo has a problem choking in big games, and that cannot reasonably be included in this rating system. I would include fumbles though. Some guys get crunched and dont give up the ball. that is valuable to the team.